October 2017 - Archives

Every ARISE class is a miracle. And not just a miracle, but miracles upon miracles. Like a cluster of delicious grapes, each one is amazing in itself and the cluster magnifies the miracle all the more. This 2017 class is no exception!

This year one of the “grapes” is a Pakistani young man named Zeerick, 18, who preached his first sermon at age four and his first evangelistic series at age six! What’s even more amazing than this, is that, after five years of marriage, Zeerick’s parents could not get pregnant and James Rafferty, while visiting Pakistan 19 years ago, prayed for them that they would be able to have a child! That child is now at ARISE, where James teaches!

What else can you call this except a miracle?

Then there’s Jeremy. Jeremy felt the pull of same-sex attraction as a teenager and, though raised in a Christian home, left the church before he was 20. That decision led to nearly two decades of participation in the LGBT lifestyle … read more »

Hardly anything Adventism believes is uniquely Adventist. So it’s not our “doctrines” that make us weird. Even the ones that we have developed and call our own are built upon foundations that are entirely non-Adventist. We did not just drop out of the sky. We did not re-invent or develop a faith in isolation from all other faith traditions. Rather, we evolved and blossomed from the stories that came before us. When we peel back all the layers of arrogant pride, sectarian ideology and holier-than-thou attitudes we arrive at a faith that is remarkably indebted to historic Christian thought. And yet, there’s something eccentric about us. We are Protestants yes. But we are also weird.

In order to explain what I mean I need to step out of Adventism a bit and take a brief view at the Protestant movement. The first inclination of Protestantism is what some refer to as the proto-Protestants (Waldensians, Lollards, and … read more »